TSMC and Samsung just posted the best quarters either chipmaker has ever had. Investors shrugged.
On October 8, two of the world's most important chipmakers reported numbers that would have been unthinkable two years ago. TSMC posted record quarterly revenue of roughly $46.71 billion, up about 50% year-over-year and ahead of its own July guidance of $44.6-45.8 billion. Samsung Electronics went further: preliminary operating profit of roughly $80.17 billion for the quarter, up nearly 783% from a year earlier — the first time Reuters has recorded any technology company clearing 100 trillion won ($80 billion-plus) in quarterly operating profit. Both results were driven by the same thing: the AI buildout's insatiable appetite for advanced logic chips and high-bandwidth memory. Both stocks fell anyway.
The numbers, unpacked
TSMC's September revenue alone hit a record 511.86 billion New Taiwan dollars, up 54.6% year-over-year — the company's best September ever — pushing its nine-month 2026 total to roughly NT$3.899 trillion, up 41.1% from the same period last year. The company's full Q3 earnings call and updated guidance are due October 15, two days after this report, so the complete picture of margins and capital spending plans is still forthcoming. Samsung's figures are preliminary too, with a full divisional breakdown due October 29, but the headline shape is already clear: revenue of roughly 195 trillion won, up 126.6% year-over-year, led by its memory business rather than its historically larger mobile or foundry units. Samsung's HBM shipments — the high-bandwidth memory that feeds Nvidia's AI accelerators, including the upcoming Vera Rubin platform — grew roughly 50% quarter-over-quarter, according to research firm TrendForce. Memory, not mobile, is now carrying Samsung's results: its mobile division reportedly lost more than $1 billion for the quarter, and its foundry business remains unprofitable.
A supercycle the market is starting to question
What makes this pair of results notable isn't just their size — it's the market's muted, even negative, reaction to them. TSMC shares fell about 1.35% in Taipei trading despite the beat. Samsung's stock, meanwhile, sits more than 25% below its June high even after preliminary profit guidance that blew past expectations. Part of the disconnect is currency: a stronger Korean won trims the dollar value of Samsung's won-denominated forecasts, muddying comparisons for international investors. But analysts have also started openly questioning how much further this cycle can run — whether AI capital expenditure at hyperscalers can keep growing at a pace that absorbs chip and memory supply at today's prices, or whether the current numbers represent a peak that's already priced in.
Kim Seok-hwan, an analyst at Mirae Asset Securities, said memory prices are expected to keep climbing through the rest of the year on tight supply, but cautioned that how long the current pace of AI-driven demand holds beyond that is the open question weighing on sentiment.
Why this matters beyond two companies
TSMC and Samsung sit at the center of the physical supply chain that every AI lab and hyperscaler ultimately depends on — TSMC as the fabricator for Nvidia's and most frontier labs' custom silicon, Samsung as one of a small number of firms capable of producing HBM at the volumes AI accelerators now require. Record results at both confirm that AI-linked capital spending is still flowing through to the companies making the physical hardware, not just the software and model layer that gets more headlines. But the stock reaction is its own signal, separate from the earnings themselves: investors who spent the past two years rewarding any AI-adjacent beat are now parsing these same numbers for signs of a ceiling — watching capex guidance, HBM pricing durability, and whether hyperscaler demand commitments extend far enough into 2027 to justify current valuations, rather than taking a record quarter at face value as proof the cycle still has room to run.